英语专业晨读美文-人物篇 1 Chemist Leo Baekeland

[00:02.71]Chemist Leo Baekeland

[00:05.67]In the opening scene of The Graduate,

[00:08.95]Benjamin (played by a young Dustin Hoffman)

[00:12.23]is awkwardly working an affluent 1 Southern California crowd

[00:15.73]at a graduation party arranged for him by his parents

[00:19.23]when a family friend offers

[00:20.87] one of the century's most famous pieces of cinematic advice:

[00:24.48] "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics."

[00:29.95]Millions of moviegoers winced 2 and smiled.

[00:33.56] The scene neatly 3 captured their own late 60's ambivalence 4

[00:37.60]toward the ever more synthetic 5 landscape of their times.

[00:41.00]They loved their cheap, easy-to-clean Formica countertops,

[00:45.04] but envied—and longed for—the authentic 6 touch

[00:48.32]and time-lessness of marble and wood.

[00:50.83]The chord struck by that line in The Graduate under-scored

[00:54.33]how much had happened in the six decades since the summer of 1907,

[00:58.60] when Leo Baekeland made the laboratory breakthrough

[01:01.44] that would change the stuff our world is made of.

[01:04.62]A Belgian-born chemist-entrepreneur,

[01:08.33]Baekeland had a knack 7 for spotting profitable opportunities.

[01:11.73]He scored his first success in the 1890s with his invention of Velox,

[01:17.41]an improved photographic paper

[01:19.32]that freed photographers from having to use sunlight

[01:22.16]for developing images. With Velox, they could rely on artificial light,

[01:26.53] which at the time usually meant gaslight but soon came to mean electric.

[01:31.68]It was a far more dependable and convenient way to work.

[01:34.95] In 1899 George Eastman,

[01:38.13]whose cameras and developing services would make photography a household activity,

[01:42.83] bought full rights to Velox for the then astonishing sum of $1 million.

[01:49.17]Starting around 1904, Baekeland and an assistant began their search.

[01:54.53]Three years later,

[01:55.95]after filling laboratory books with page after page of failed experiments,

[02:00.88] Baekeland finally developed a material that he dubbed 8 in his notebooks "Bakelite".

[02:06.67] The key turned out to be his "bakelizer",

[02:09.51] a heavy iron vessel 9 that was part pressure cooker and part basement boiler 10.

[02:14.55]With it, he was able to control the formaldehyde phenol reaction

[02:19.02]with more finesse 11 than had anyone before him.

[02:21.75]Initial heating of the phenol and formaldehyde

[02:24.93](in the presence of an acid or base to get the reaction going)

[02:28.31]produced a shellac-like liquid good for coating surfaces like a varnish 12.

[02:33.23] Further heating turned the liquid into a pasty, gummier good.

[02:37.17]And when Baekeland put this stuff into the bakelizer,

[02:39.90]he was rewarded with a hard, translucent 13,

[02:43.19]infinitely moldable substance. In a word: plastic.